The recent increases in tuition at Kansas universities have in recent years become something of a cautionary tale in public finance, but the data from this season is downright encouraging: although the final arbitration on the Board of Regents proposal isn’t to occur until tomorrow, it will likely amount to an increase of about six percent, the lowest nominal bump in tuition any current student will have ever enjoyed during his or her tenure. (By comparison, due to budget cuts in Topeka, our tuition has doubled since 2002.) The Regents’ modest proposal is even more remarkable given the collapsing scenery of the economy; depending on the source, this paltry increase might not even cover the damage dealt by our unfettered inflation. The managers of the university’s appropriations have clearly done their homework this year—on paper, at least.
But nonetheless, are we, as our financial advisors suggest to us in boiler-room parlance, making our money work for us, or is the cost of college simply yet another avenue in which we are being taken for a ride? (The Princeton Review has a reassuring response, continuing to include K-State as one of its highly respected “Top Five Best Bargains.”) Anyone with a soupçon of common sense knows how progressively more critical the imperative is for a college degree in the professional arena; the wage gap between college graduate and non-graduate is at $20,000 per year, and it shows no sign of settling down. And if I may argue with my tongue only slightly in my cheek—and as always, I relish the opportunity—I will submit the following claim: especially in light of the current fiscal landscape, this tuition increase is not only predictable but wholly inescapable, and furthermore, precisely what we deserve.
At a time when the dollar buys a third of the fuel it did only a few years ago, and unemployment sits at over five percent, our student body just recently—via the “democratic” method of the general referendum—approved of a $24 million addition to the Rec Center. And, of course, we mustn’t forget the $30 million with which we parted ways the year before last, when we authorized the construction of a parking garage in front of the student union. Are these prudent uses of our resources? Of course not. And never mind how our senate and the tyrannical majority sanctioned such self-evidently foolish expenditures, how did they ever survive long enough to reach a ballot in the first place?
Because the student body, for all its whining and white noise, doesn’t actually care. How much time has the average student spent examining the proceedings of our student senate or state legislature? Clearly not enough. (This ostensibly boring activity reaps considerable dividends—the frivolity of some of the resolutions are alone worth the price of admission, and the bills themselves raise the question of exactly which groups don’t get funding, rather than vice versa. As discomforted as I am to be channeling Rep. Ron Paul, the fact every legislative body up to and including the U.S. Senate engages in such misbehavior is certainly not any kind of license for our own legislative bodies to do so. All official SGA documents, including the minutes, are available for your perusal at http://www.k-state.edu/osas/sga/documents.htm.)
I don’t often speak for the conservative, but it must be said: any person who supported of either of the two aforementioned major expenditures—or others like them—has forfeited his or her entitlement to complain about the costs of tuition, and it’s the job of the conservative to continually reassert that rule. And for once, his job is essential; our paychecks really do lie in the balance.
